Cosmopolis Mayor Vickie Raines thought about running for county commissioner before.
The timing just never worked out. Her family and job had come first. And, when Cosmopolis faced some of its deepest financial challenges following the mill closure back in 2006, Raines said she felt compelled to help out.
“I owed it to the people to help steer the course,” said Raines, who has served as mayor of Cosmopolis since 2002.
In 2011, Raines started really exploring the idea. Months later, on a 2-1 vote, the county commissioners re-drew the political boundaries as part of its once-a-decade redistricting process and moved the entire city of Cosmopolis from District 2, based in Aberdeen, to District 3, linked with Hoquiam and Ocean Shores. That meant even if Raines had been interested in running for county commissioner in 2012, the Democratic county commissioners took that choice away from her. Raines called the process “politics at its worse.”
Today, Raines is the frontrunner in her campaign to be county commissioner, garnering about a third of the votes in a four-way primary contest in August. The General Election goes countywide now, with Aberdeen and East County voters having a say. She faces Republican Keith Olson, a former teacher and logger from Lake Quinault. Both are running for the seat of Herb Welch, who chose not to file for re-election.
Raines says she has more time to devote to the county because her children are older — with her son on a recent mission for their church in Louisiana.
Raines says she’s become soured on party politics, one of the reasons she has chosen not to file for any party affiliation. She wanted to file as non-partisan, but County Auditor Vern Spatz said he was prepared to challenge that wording because he thought it would confuse voters. Filing without any party affiliation at all was the compromise, allowed under state law.
The issue of partisanship could be particularly important in this election as both Olson and Raines try to convince people, who typically vote party line Democrat, that they could be the best candidate for the position. It’s the first time in decades that a Democrat hasn’t appeared on the General Election ballot for county commissioner.
“This office shouldn’t be a partisan office,” Raines said. “A county commissioner’s position is very similar to a mayor’s position — and yet a county commissioner is asked to declare a political party, while a mayor runs as non-partisan. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Jim Eddy, a devout Democrat, says as far as he’s concerned Raines is a Democrat — even if she’s not running as one.
Eddy even has a shirt that says, he’s voting for “Vickie ‘I’m a Democrat I’ve always been a Democrat’ Raines.”
But Raines is quick to point out that her co-campaign managers are from different parties. The campaign is co-led by Tami Garrow, the retired CEO of Satsop Business Park whom Raines described as a Democrat; and Kellie Daniels, a former staffer for Republican U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton. Daniels has helped on numerous Republican campaigns over the years for those interested in state and federal office, including Dino Rossi and Rob McKenna.
When she first announced for her candidacy, Raines said, “President John F. Kennedy once said, ‘Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.’”
“I have some very Democratic values and some very conservative beliefs on the other end,” Raines added in a recent interview. “I consider myself a centrist. I was raised in an all Democrat family but you have to admit the Democrats today are not the same as the Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s — and, in fact, both parties have changed. My whole issue is that there is no place for partisan politics at the county at all. Does the coroner go to a scene and say, ‘Is that person a Democrat?’ Of course not.”
If she wins, she says she’ll be the first county commissioner without a party affiliation — and maybe even the first county commissioner to call Cosmopolis home.
Besides her duties as mayor, she also serves as chair of the Chehalis Basin Flood Authority and participates in a separate flooding work group convened first by Gov. Chris Gregoire and now Gov. Jay Inslee.
Her full-time job is a practice manager with Lindley Financial Services in Montesano, a background she says has helped her understand finances.
Raines said she’s been a union member and also negotiated union contracts. However, at a time of financial distress for the city of Cosmopolis, she also supported her police officers when they disbanded their union.
When Weyerhaeuser shuttered the Cosmopolis Pulp Mill in 2006, the city of Cosmopolis lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and was forced to do massive cutbacks.
In 2010, Raines recalls asking the voters for an additional $138,000 a year to prop up the crippled city budget — and the voters soundly rejected the plan by 65 percent. The good news is that Cosmo Specialty Fibers bought the mill again — and the city is slowly, and carefully, adding back services and awarding raises to employees who didn’t see them for years, Raines said.
“So, no, we didn’t go back to the voters again and delay our cuts,” Raines said. “We cut. We found a way. We had less services. The voters had their say and said ‘no.’ So, when I see the way the county did its budget — by doing a road levy shift for the past three years in order to prop up its own budget, to make the residents of our city and other cities pay more without even going to the voters and asking them, that angers me.”
Raines and Olson both have said they won’t support the road levy shift, which takes money from the county’s road budget and shifts it to the operating fund as a way to generate more money in that fund. Along with opposition from County Commissioner Wes Cormier, it leaves this year as the last potential year for the county to pursue the extra revenue, which County Commissioner Frank Gordon says he’ll request in this year’s county budget.
“Whatever we’ve been doing we haven’t been doing it right and we haven’t been doing right for a very long time,” Raines said. “So, these past few years, the county has built up a reserve. But it’s been built on a budget that depended on the use of this road levy shift. The county should have been building its budget without it. Now, if the budget is going to be $2 million in the hole, it’s not going to be fun. It’s a hornet’s nest — but I have the experience to make the hard decisions on this one and it doesn’t mean, come January, that Wes and I can’t go in there and make the changes we need to make. I’d just say Commissioner Gordon better scrape and get everything he can because it will be the last year.”
During a recent door belling trip to Elma, Raines encountered residents worried about finances, tax increases and some who had no idea what a county commissioner actually does.
“You’d be surprised how often I get asked to explain the job,” Raines said.
Brian Schweitzer of Elma told her that he had been hurt in a logging accident some years ago and his wife recently lost her dog grooming business.
“Things are tight,” he told her. “It’s life. It’s a battle, but it’s doing good.”
Schweitzer was asked what kind of candidate he was looking for.
“I want someone who is positive and looking to make a change, like yourself,” he told Raines. “You look legit. You don’t look like someone who, when I turn around, will put a knife in my back.”
“You have to remember as a county official, it’s people like you I work for and I’ll keep you in my prayers,” Raines replied.
Raines said that besides the economy, she gets consistent questions about the potential for oil trains coming to the Harbor and the export facilities proposed to go at the Port of Grays Harbor.
While Olson says he is opposed to the oil trains and favors an oil pipeline instead, Raines has been careful not to come down too heavily one way or another on the issue. This has not generated many fans among the opposition to the proposals.
“It’s so divided,” Raines said. “I get people who live right next to the railroad tracks concerned about the train traffic and other people who say, ‘We need jobs. We need jobs.’ And my response has been — and I’m just getting hammered by the oil train opponents — that as a county commissioner, we won’t make the decision and I’m not advocating for it or opposing the trains, but if oil is to come here, we need to make sure the regulations and guidelines are in compliance and people remain safe. Sure, I have concerns. We don’t know how many jobs it will really bring. I’ve heard a dozen to 200 jobs. One spill could — just one along the waterway — and you look at all of the tourism, commercial fishing and shellfish — all of those jobs would be lost.”
Raines said she believes Puget Sound &Pacific Railroad will upgrade its tracks as promised.
If elected, Raines admits she may have more of a challenge working with Commissioner Gordon, who actively has campaigned against her, questioning her temperament to be a commissioner. But she feels she can work with Commissioner Cormier and actually supports some of his ideas — including no building permits for 800-square foot outbuildings.
She says that she would have supported Cormier’s idea to remove East County from the proposed hospital district benefiting Grays Harbor Community Hospital. Officials at Summit Pacific Medical Center had made the request.
“Montesano, for sure, should have been given a chance to be part of Summit Pacific Medical Center’s hospital district,” Raines said. “Frankly, I don’t understand why we need two hospital districts and think, some day, there might just be one in this county.”
On a 2-1 vote, Montesano and other parts of East County were left intact with the larger boundaries to support Community Hospital. The people ultimately approved the district.
Raines said she would not take as hard a line against eminent domain as Cormier, though. Cormier says he would never vote to condemn a private landowner’s property and take it for public use.
Raines views it as a last resort option.
“I think the eminent domain process can be a useful one when it’s used properly,” Raines said, noting that the city of Cosmopolis had taken a look at using eminent domain when Weyerhaeuser had abandoned the pulp mill, but rejected the option when the city would have been on the hook for the clean up.
“To go in and take someone’s property, I think you negotiate until the end,” she said. “At some point the use of eminent domain is appropriate as long as the process is used appropriately.”
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